Consultation on Powers in Relation to UK-related Domain Name Registries

Thursday 20th July 2023 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology (Paul Scully)]

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) will be commencing sections 19-21 of the Digital Economy Act 2010 (DEA 2010).

This legislation sets out the DSIT Secretary of State’s powers of intervention in the event when any UK-related domain name registry fails to address serious, relevant abuses of their domain names, posing significant risk to the UK electronic communications networks and its users.

It is important we undertake this work to ensure that the UK will continue to meet international best practice on governance of country code top-level domains in line with our key global trading partners and our future global trading commitments.

The UK’s internet registries work hard to tackle abuses of their domain names. These powers will provide additional certainty for UK users that appropriate procedures will continue to be in place to help address abuse of UK-related domain names.

DSIT will be setting out in secondary legislation a list of misuses and unfair uses of domain names that registries in scope must take action to mitigate and deal with, and also cover the registry’s arrangements for dealing with complaints in connection with the domain names in scope.

In order to understand the wide landscape of stakeholder views on UK-related domain names, a full public consultation has been published today and will run for six weeks.

A copy of this consultation will be placed in the Libraries of both Houses and published on gov.uk.

[HCWS984]